Armando's Barber Stylist still snipping away after 40 years

UPPER MERION — The memories, the stories – they all come at a fairly fast clip here at Armando’s Barber Stylist shop.

After all, there are more than 40 years of them to keep founder Armando Mastrocola buzzing passionately about the trade he learned as a boy in his native Italy.

Since making the cut as one of the first store owners when the Valley Forge Shopping Center debuted in 1971, Mastrocola’s cut such a well known figure in King of Prussia that, to his generations of customers, he’s practically in a league with the famous heads he’s turned to trim.

“I do have a lot of good memories in this place,” said Mastrocola, who turned the business over to son Carlo Mastrocola earlier this year, but has no intention of hanging up his sheers.

When he’s not traveling and spending time with his wife Mary Ann — “I always credit her for my success, for raising our three children,” he said — or playing bocce ball for the Holy Saviour Bocce Club, you can find him here at this legendary tonsorial parlor every Friday and Saturday, wielding scissors and comb alongside his son and the rest of the barbering and styling staff: Galina Dunay Jeff Phillips and Marlena Racz.

“We are like a family here, and our customers feel like part of the family too,” Mastrocola said. “A customer may be a stranger the first time, but the second time they’re a member of the shop. We’ll know their name and where they’re from.”

On any given day, a steady stream of men, women and children wait for a turn in one of the five available barber chairs.

More than a place to sit down for a trim and a shave, a barbershop is a social gathering place where people feel comfortable chewing the fat, Mastrocola noted.

In fact, a Washington columnist once took note of Mastrocola’s theory that barbershop patrons are the ones who know the real America.

“There is no better place than a barbershop to find out what people are thinking,” he said. “Whether it’s the traffic, the mall, the new Wawa in King of Prussia, they’re talking about it here.”

More than one Upper Merion official over the years has been known to solicit his thoughts on public opinion, Mastrocola said.

“Because people come in here and talk openly, so they ask me what the locals are talking about, the good and the bad, what they want to see happen,” Mastrocola said. “People aren’t afraid to talk in a barbershop.”

He did remember one bunch of regular customers who weren’t so chatty when they sat in his chairs — at least not about the work they were doing at the General Electric aerospace program in King of Prussia.

“At that time the work they were doing was so classified, and all these guys from the space program would come in here to get their hair cut,” Mastrocla recalled. “I wasn’t aware of what was going on with the space program and Apollo 14. I’d see them all the time but nobody could talk about it.”

Years later, when organizing a reunion dinner in 2011, the men remembered their old friend.

“That was the most exciting thing for me, to be a guest of honor at the 50th anniversary of the GE space program,” Mastrocola said. “I was never aware how lucky I was to know all these people. They wanted me to be a part of the celebration because I was the barber to them all. It was a special day for me, that a barber would be welcome into that group.”

The rhythm of life in King of Prussia is certainly more hectic than it was 40 years ago — unless you’re talking about the cozy quarters of Armando’s barber shop, where time seems to stand still.

The easygoing atmosphere could almost lull you into believing that there are still only three traffic lights out on DeKalb Pike — as there were when the shop opened — and that a haircut still costs $2.25.

“We have kept the price at $16 for years because we understand what people are up against with the economy,” Mastrocola said. “But I do think King of Prussia has changed for the better. No matter where I go all over the world, everybody knows King of Prussia because of the mall. Forty years ago it wasn’t like that, but now King of Prussia is on the map. And that makes me proud to be a business in King of Prussia.

That’s one of the reasons I can’t let this place go,” he added. “There are too many memories.”